Page 48 of The Desert King's Kidnapped Virgin
And perhaps there had been a different sort of knowledge in her gaze, too.
I will, Hope had agreed.
Though she was testing how that agreement tasted on her mouth. She didn’t intend to share that with her attendant.
Our great lord will be the happiest of men, the girl had said, though she and Hope had continued to gaze at each other, engaged in a different sort of conversation altogether.
I’m sure he will be transported, Hope had replied.
And then had found herself wishing both that she’d taught the girl no English at all, or that she’d taught her a good deal more. Because she thought it would be better if she hadn’t spoken up at all. Or, having done so, it would have felt much nicer if she could have gone down the list of pros and cons with the girl, as if she was any one of those old friends Hope had once had, long ago.
Instead, she’d ended up taking herself off to the dungeons.
She nodded off, there on the floor of the cell, which was significantly less comfortable than it looked. Which was saying something.
And then she woke up in a rush to a commotion out in the hall. She blinked in confusion at first, scrubbing her hands over her face and wondering if she would ever regain feeling in her bottom, then looked up. She expected to see Cyrus.
But instead, it was the women who attended her in the harem. And a selection of the guards. They all carried piles of things in their arms.
One of the older women barked at the guard outside the cell, the door was flung open, and in they streamed. Two of them came to Hope and clucked over her as if they’d found her in a garbage heap. The rest bustled this way and that until the cell better resembled the harem alcove room Hope had left up above. The cell was draped in luxury and not to be outdone, they had tucked Hope into the bed they’d made out of a pile of soft mattresses.
She almost sent them away, because she knew who must have ordered this.
But there was such a thing as cutting off her nose to spite her face.
“This is some kind of miracle,” Hope breathed.
One of the older women said something in reply, and everyone—or rather, every woman—burst into laughter. Yara laughed too. But she sobered, patting Hope’s hand. “She says that the curse of the King is that he must also be a man, and therefore given to foolishness like any other. So it is with our lord.”
“Such a pity,” Hope murmured, without as much guilt as she should have felt for not making sure they knew he hadn’t put her here. “That even kings must be men in the end.”
The women all laughed again. And only when they were all satisfied that their charge would sleep as comfortable a night as possible did they leave her to it.
And the next time Hope woke, the Lord and King of Aminabad was watching her from the other side of the bars.
Hope stretched as she sat up. “You’re the one who encouraged me to believe in fairy tales, and look at what happened in the night! Don’t you know? Anything is possible if you make a wish, Cyrus.”
“It looks comfortable enough,” Cyrus said quietly. “But there is a whole world out there, and I suspect you will grow tired of this cell soon enough.”
And every time he came to visit her after that, the cell was even more pleasant. First there were thick rugs on the floor so her foot need not touch the cold stone. The women had erected something far more pleasant and civilized over that hole in the ground, then moved screens around it for privacy. On the walls, they hung priceless tapestries, and a series of tables to hold lanterns and the books they knew she liked to read.
One time he came she was eating a meal they’d brought her that was most decidedly not prison rations. Like gruel, she imagined, whateverthatwas.
She waved a roast chicken leg at him as she sat cross-legged on the comfortable floor that easily rivaled the luxurious space they’d used many times on the top of his tower. “Some people are queasy when they’re pregnant,” she told him, as if he’d asked. And it was easy to smile cheerfully when he looked so...glowering. “But not me. If anything, I’m that much more ravenous.”
“Tell me how this happened,” Cyrus said, his voice low and intense. Though she did not think he soundedbetrayed.It seemed a crucial distinction.
“I think you know,” she said. She patted her belly. “At least, I hope you know, with all your fancy education. Because I know, and I left school at sixteen.”
“I don’t mean the child.”
And Hope studied his face, there on the other side of the bars that separated them. And she thought the bars made it all too clear what else separated them, that she had not paid enough attention to these last months.
“You don’t want me to love you,” she said softly.
“How could you?” he asked, sounding eminently reasonable when the question was anything but. “We met when I kidnapped you.”
“From a wedding I am just as happy to have missed. Let’s not forget that part. Surely I should be the one who gets to decide if I feel traumatized by my own rescue.”
